Intellectual history has always been a bit embattled in the English-speaking world, especially the sort of intellectual history that deals with cosmic moods and ideas. There always been those who have tried to place the practitioners of this kind of intellectual history on the defensive. However, the great masters of this discipline— a Dilthey or a Burckhardt or a Lovejoy—continue to cast their spell over many of us. Even in this most utilitarian and political of decades, their achievement remains breathtaking. But it is no use pretending that the approach to history that focuses on “Geistesgeschichte” has no “blind spots.” As with any human enterprise, it has its strengths and weaknessess, its keen insights, its narrowness of vision. This paper is an attempt to point to some of the sources of both the abiding greatness and the blind spots of this approach to history, and to explain why this sort of intellectual history still speaks to many of us.

At the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904, the traditionally close relationship between Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia appeared as cordial as ever. Russia had an alliance with France but, except for its lucrative financial advantages for the Russians, this Dual Alliance remained largely an untested one vis-à-vis Germany. Less than a year after the conclusion of peace between Russia and Japan meaningful friendship between Russia and Germany ceased to exist. Within another year, Russia settled her major Asiatic differences with Great Britain, thus completing the process of isolating Germany diplomatically. The culminating period in this deterioration of Russo-German friendship occurred during the seven-month interval between the end of the Portsmouth Peace Conference in September 1905 and Germany's refusal to participate in the international loan to Russia in April 1906. This paper seeks to examine the causes of Russo-German estrangement within the framework of interrelated and often conflicting considerations of German Weltpolitik, Russian military defeats, the Revolution of 1905, and the international aspects of the Moroccan question.

Germany under the Weimar Republic played the role of champion of minorities in Europe. A combination of revisionist hopes, völkisch arrogance, and humanitarian concern for the fate of lost kin motivated the Minderheitenpolitik of the Reich. Most historians have interpreted this episode as a link between the imperialism of Wilhelmian Germany and that of the Third Reich, a refinement—dictated by weakness—of Berlin's continuing efforts to dominate Eastern Europe.

In the issue of June 1971, there appeared David Felix's “Reparations Reconsidered with a Vengeance,” which constitutes an assault upon my article, “Reparations Reconsidered: A Reminder,” in the December 1969 issue. Unfortunately, Mr. Felix has attacked an article which I did not write rather than the one which I did write. My brief ten-page essay addressed itself exclusively to the question of how much Germany was initially asked to pay and consisted of little more than a close textual analysis of the London Schedule of Payments of May 5, 1921. My main point, which Mr. Felix accepts, was that this document established the German reparations debt at a nominal value of 50 billion gold marks, not the figure of 132 billion gold marks widely cited in the general literature concerning the period. Secondly, I pointed out that Germany had offered to pay a considerably larger amount less than two weeks before. Mr. Felix ignores this point while attacking my conclusion based upon it to the effect that the London Schedule constituted a victory for the Germans. Finally, I remarked briefly that, with a high ostensible figure and much lower actual payments, the Germans had an excellent propaganda position and made the most of it, leading the English-speaking world to believe that the reparations burden was both outrageous and unpayable. I concluded that “We shall never know what Germany could have paid, had she seen any reason to do so, but we can easily demonstrate that the settlement was not outrageous, even in German eyes” (p. 365).

Although most students of contemporary German history, especially of the National Socialist period, are aware of the United States Document Center at Berlin (BDC) and its general holdings, that archive is not being exploited to its potential. This is primarily because the Document Center was created and organized for the political purpose of compiling information on the activities of individual Nazis. For this reason, the holdings lend themselves most readily to the study of individual involvement and to quantitative research on the personnel of various groups and agencies of the Third Reich. Unfortunately, this same organizational arrangement makes it extremely difficult and time-consuming to pursue a non-biographical or non-quantitative research problem. Nevertheless, the collections contain information to be found nowhere else—information on institutional, political, social, and economic problems which go well beyond the scope of an individual's involvement or beyond the sociological data which might be compiled from the personnel files. Unfortunately, there are no adequate finding aids for the Document Center, and a general vagueness of knowledge about the full extent of its holdings seems to plague even veteran users and the document center personnel themselves.